Category: Synagogue Membership Tracking

A few new fields

Ever-responsive to customer requests, we have added a few fields.  The reader will note that, when we add fields, that implies that, not only do we carry them in the database, but also

  1. They are present in spreadsheet uploads, for bulk data input.
  2. They are present in spreadsheet downloads.
  3. They are available for searching.

Within the Member person records, we have added marital status and maiden name.  Thus, if you’re planning to run a young singles night, you could ask the system for a list of those with marital status of ‘single’ who are under the age of –you pick it– …And then email those Members from within the software.

Within Yahrzeit records, we have added Hebrew name and maiden name.

Graphs and Charts

Visualization!

ShalomCloud now provides various ways to depict your data.  This initial rollout includes:

  1. Families joining, by year
  2. Pledged amounts and owed amounts, by year
  3. Pie chart of revenue by category
  4. “Burndown” chart–month by month cumulative totals of pledged and paid amounts.

Here’s a five-minute video showing this feature in action.

Import and Export

An opinion based on decades of dealing with programs and users (please forgive the virtual yelling):

It’s your data.  Your should be able to extract it into a spreadsheet at any time.

Too often, purveyors of software make you a prisoner of their environment, because your data is locked inside their database.  As a trivial example, I’ve seen this in a lot of to-do apps.   You might have a hundred items in there, and you may wish to extract them for offline analysis.  “No,” say many vendors.

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